Channon Kevin, MacPhee Cait E
School of Chemistry, University of Bristol, Bristol, UKBS8 1TS.
Department of Physics, University of Edinburgh, James Clerk Maxwell Building, The King's Buildings, Mayfield Road, Edinburgh, UKEH9 3JZ.
Soft Matter. 2008 Mar 20;4(4):647-652. doi: 10.1039/b713013a.
Programmed assembly and self-assembly of soft materials offers significant promise for the generation of new types of materials with useful properties. Through evolutionary processes occurring over billions of years, nature has produced numerous optimised building blocks for the controlled assembly of a wide range of complex architectures. Our challenge now is to imitate these naturally occurring processes for technological applications, either using biological molecules such as DNA and proteins, or macromolecular mimics that retain many of the important features of biological molecules while introducing new functionalities. We focus on a single example of biomolecular self-assembly-the self-assembly of polypeptides, including polypeptide mimics, into quasi-one-dimensional fibres-to provide a flavour of the utility of soft biological materials for construction purposes.
软材料的程序化组装和自组装为生成具有有用特性的新型材料带来了巨大希望。经过数十亿年的进化过程，大自然产生了众多优化的构建模块，用于可控地组装各种复杂结构。我们现在面临的挑战是，将这些自然发生的过程应用于技术领域，要么使用DNA和蛋白质等生物分子，要么使用保留生物分子许多重要特征同时引入新功能的大分子模拟物。我们专注于生物分子自组装的一个例子——多肽（包括多肽模拟物）自组装成准一维纤维，以展现软生物材料在构建用途方面的实用性。
